ABSTRACT
After a hundred years of labour suppression, Korean labour relations encountered an incident that resulted in a fundamental transformation of industrial relations. Ironically, the very factors that had previously made rapid economic growth possible accelerated the decline of the existing political and industrial order (Verma, Kochan and Lansbury, 1995). That is, as economic growth continued, the newly formed middle-class noticed the imbalance between the rapid pace of such growth and the slow development of political and industrial democracy in society as a whole. This highly educated middle class became capable of challenging the old system. Since the mid-1980s, there had been pressure for the equal distribution of wealth and growing demands for political and industrial democracy expressed in the form of autonomous unionism, adversarial collective bargaining and aggressive labour disputes. Thus, the late-1980s witnessed the demise of the old industrial order and a search for a new one. We start this chapter by describing the Great Labour Struggle of 1987.
